Five countries on emergency aid, six consecutive quarters of economic contraction and 19 million people out of work haven’t dimmed the euro’s allure for small states like Latvia.

On Wednesday, Latvia was put on the path to becoming the 18th country to use the euro at the start of 2014, binding it deeper into the Western European economy and providing an extra layer of insulation against Russia, its former imperial overlord.

Olli Rehn, the EU’s top economic and monetary official, said Wednesday that Latvia’s membership bid was “further evidence that those who predicted the disintegration of the euro area were wrong.”

Latvia’s entry into the currency bloc will come after debt-encumbered Greece dodged leaving it and a newly elected government in Iceland decided that joining would be a bad idea.

In making its endorsement, the European Commission said Latvia is already “well-integrated” with the broader European economy. European finance ministers, who have never overturned a commission recommendation on euro eligibility, will make the final decision on Latvia on July 9 — following further consultation among EU leaders and Parliament.

Once the formal approvals are in, Latvia is expected to replace its national currency, the lat, with the euro on Jan. 1, 2014. Latvia committed to join the eurozone in 2004 when it joined the European Union.

“I don’t think this says that the eurozone is out of trouble,” Simon Johnson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bloomberg View columnist, said on Bloomberg Television’s “Surveillance.” “It says that the eurozone is becoming more Germanic, more northerly in its orientation, in its attitude, perhaps in its culture. There are still big problems in the peripheral parts of Europe, particularly around the Mediterranean.”

The 2 million Latvians are veterans of the boom-bust cycle, replete with a European Union and International Monetary Fund bailout, that besets countries along Europe’s southern rim. Latvia rebounded from Europe’s deepest recession, with the economy shrinking 17.7 percent in 2009, to notch its fastest growth, 5.6 percent, last year.

To join the euro, Latvia had to show the EU that it could control inflation, deficits and government debt, and keep its currency in a narrow exchange rate range with the euro.

Compared with heavily indebted euro countries such as Greece, Portugal and Italy, Latvia’s government finances are in good shape. Its budget deficit at the end of 2012 was a modest 1.2 percent of annual economic output, well below the EU’s 3 percent limit. Its debt burden was 41 percent of output, less than the 60 percent requirement and far less than the eurozone average of 91 percent.

The underside is an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent in March, with 21.9 percent of young Latvians looking for work and many emigrating to find it. About 40 percent of Latvians risk “poverty or social exclusion” in the country’s downsized welfare state, the commission said last week.

Latvia and its Baltic neighbors Lithuania and Estonia tend to be in favor of integration with Western Europe, in part due to fear of pressure by Russia. They were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union during World War II and only regained their independence in 1991.

Economic benefits of joining the euro include not having the costs and inconvenience of exchanging one currency for another while traveling or doing business across borders. Government and companies in euro states also in theory have wider access to credit from lenders across the eurozone. And the euro is more stable and less prone to inflation than some of its predecessor currencies. Latvia already had some of those advantages by firmly pegging the lat to the euro.

The pluses must be weighed against the loss of a country’s ability to independently raise or lower its interest rates to deal with an economic slowdown or excessive inflation. There is just one benchmark interest rate set for all euro members by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, based on the needs of the entire eurozone economy.

Despite the Commission’s preliminary approval, European officials expressed lingering concerns about the country’s banking system due to its high percentage of deposits from nonresidents, mainly Russians. Nonresident depositors are regarded as more likely to flee in case of trouble than domestic savers. This could undermine the stability of the banks.